Finishing up the hardware


Seriously ? I know I come from Win7 and all, but damn...

I don't expect any Windows computer to be of any use below 4GB. Is Linux this light ?

How could it be both lighter on memory (HDD and RAM) and on CPU as well ? That's beyond belief...
Linux itself should run on about 2 MB of RAM (maybe even less). However the choice of programs you run on top of that can greatly increase the requirements.There have been plenty of Android phones with about 2GB of RAM (Android is a fairly heavy-weight flavour of Linux).

Naturally, the selection of ported software will adapt to cater to what memory is available. The more programs you run in parallel, the more RAM you will

require. That said, the Pandora was running on 256 MB of RAM and was perfectly usuable.
 
2GB of RAM should be adequate to run the Debian OS,  3 Android VMs, web browser, LibreOffice, a movie and one incredibly resource intensive game all at once - but not much more than that.   :lol:
Seriously ? I know I come from Win7 and all, but damn...

I don't expect any Windows computer to be of any use below 4GB. Is Linux this light ?

How could it be both lighter on memory (HDD and RAM) and on CPU as well ? That's beyond belief...
Coded better, less bloat, probably more dynamic linking, a more modular approach, and because everything can be recompiled specifically for the platform (in particular, the kernel), everything can be better tuned to the specific device. In the Windows world, everything is binary-only, and those binaries have to work on a large variety of hardware, so probably a large percentage of your Windows install consists of stuff that never gets executed.
 
I understand that, and I saw that mem usage by myself when I gave Linux a try some months ago (gave up because of lack of experience, not enough time to learn and mostly because of unsupported hardware). But we can't put it all on the quality of code.

And if there's many unused DLLs and all explaining the size part, then where goes the RAM on idle ? That's pretty much the same thing I'm wondering about with Chrome (memory hog for sure). I can see that Aero and other high-end Windows functions can slow down a computer, but this shouldn't be the major cause.

I'm still wondering how Linux manages to be this light / Windows comes to be this heavy.
 
I'm still wondering how Linux manages to be this light / Windows comes to be this heavy.
Supply and demand. Windows runs primarily on x86 hardware where RAM is easily and cheaply accessible.It is more costly to optimize the OS and applications than for people to buy more memory.

Linux is big in the embedded market where minimizing the cost of the devices is a major goal.

Therefore making the OS lightweight has traditionally been of great importance.
 
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... +2600 tabs total, +400 pages active ...
What for?  If it's just for testing purposes then even if PYRA were to have a gazillion GB of ram, it's still not enough as you always have ways to max out the ram by opening a +2600 gazillion tabs total, and +400 gazillion pages active ;)
Thats just how i use Firefox, and it works for me.
Tactile feedback is enough for me, auditory feedback is not important then.
The only feedback I need is the visual feedback.
Linux itself should run on about 2 MB of RAM (maybe even less).
Recommended memory for the kernel alone is 8MB, but people did into 640k :)
 
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Windows OS will take as much free ram as possible and when u need it, it will relinquish it and let u have it, it's better for your RAM to actually be in use than it is not in use.
 
Android is a fairly heavy-weight flavour of Linux
Android's architecture is designed to keep as many apps in memory, suspended, as possible. This is a design feature and if you need more RAM than is currently available the system will kill off an application to free more up. This makes it difficult to know how much RAM can actually be made available for your application, unfortunately, leading to people assuming Android *requires* large amounts of RAM. It doesn't, it can make due on very little RAM, it just keeps fewer applications suspended at once.
Windows OS will take as much free ram as possible and when u need it, it will relinquish it and let u have it, it's better for your RAM to actually be in use than it is not in use.
Linux and Mac do the same. As far as I recall, Windows is actually fairly late to the game with doing this cacheing. That's not what anyone is talking about though, that stuff doesn't appear as "used", as far as the system is concerned that is free even if its in use.The legitimate complaints are that Windows doesn't just consume more RAM, it actually requires more RAM, a similar system being able to do less at one time in the same amount of RAM on Windows as it does on Linux. I don't have an answer as to why.
 
I suspect that in Windows, a non-negligible amount of RAM is used by known and unknown, intended or unintended backdoors, spyware, malware, viruses, anti-viruses, anti-anti-viruses, and so on.
 
I heard that Windows devs are not able to view anything but their own code, so they can't check the other devs' code. That would explain the great lack of optimization, as well as the inability to find security leaks, and thus patch them.
 
I heard that Windows devs are not able to view anything but their own code, so they can't check the other devs' code. That would explain the great lack of optimization, as well as the inability to find security leaks, and thus patch them.
nanostallman
 
512 MB is more of a usability minimum. Sadly I have an Android device. 512 MB of RAM. As long as I single-task (when I'm done with an application, open the window manager and nuke all windows), it works relatively well.
 
My Android phone has 1GB of RAM and even that does not seem to be enough to do multitasking: switching between the browser and a game for example, is likely to get the other thing killed. This is very annoying. Randomly killing stuff when stupid poorly coded apps request too much memory, I don't really like that principle.

My Pandora with 512MB of RAM is much, much better at multitasking than my Android phone with 1GB of RAM. Both are technically Linux-based, but I think Android illustrates how even a good base can always still be screwed up by the layers above.
 
My Android phone has 1GB of RAM and even that does not seem to be enough to do multitasking: switching between the browser and a game for example, is likely to get the other thing killed. This is very annoying. Randomly killing stuff when stupid poorly coded apps request too much memory, I don't really like that principle.

My Pandora with 512MB of RAM is much, much better at multitasking than my Android phone with 1GB of RAM. Both are technically Linux-based, but I think Android illustrates how even a good base can always still be screwed up by the layers above.
To be fair, phones are suited to be a bunch of tasks Pandoras aren't. At the very least they've got to be ready to receive calls and start taking pictures. And if your phone's significantly higher resolution than your Pandora that's going to have a memory cost too. I doubt these things account for all of the higher footprint but surely some of it.
 
My Android phone has 1GB of RAM and even that does not seem to be enough to do multitasking: switching between the browser and a game for example, is likely to get the other thing killed. This is very annoying. Randomly killing stuff when stupid poorly coded apps request too much memory, I don't really like that principle.


My Pandora with 512MB of RAM is much, much better at multitasking than my Android phone with 1GB of RAM. Both are technically Linux-based, but I think Android illustrates how even a good base can always still be screwed up by the layers above.
To be fair, phones are suited to be a bunch of tasks Pandoras aren't. At the very least they've got to be ready to receive calls and start taking pictures. And if your phone's significantly higher resolution than your Pandora that's going to have a memory cost too. I doubt these things account for all of the higher footprint but surely some of it.
Only receiving calls is something that a phone is constantly ready for. Taking pictures: not so much, the camera app can take its time to load. Other background stuff (text messages and all kinds of notifications): probably a lot of that going on, but those shouldn't really require tons of memory (but they probably do) -- the data itself (text messages, emails, tweets, whatever) should be very small, and the code to receive the data should not be that complicated, I don't really see why it would need more than, say, 1MB.
 
How much energy does RAM memory need? I suspect it's not a huge amount compared to all the rest, but keep in mind that RAM is always powered, even in standby mode when the screen and the CPU are effectively consuming zero power, so perhaps the power consumption of the RAM does play a role in the battery life.
Well... Linux does support memory hotplugging...

2GB of RAM should be adequate to run the Debian OS,  3 Android VMs, web browser, LibreOffice, a movie and one incredibly resource intensive game all at once - but not much more than that.   :lol:
How will that work,  if Android itself requires 3 GB of RAM? (will Android VMs be officially supported?)
 
Taking pictures: not so much, the camera app can take its time to load.
Maybe you feel that way. Other people want to be able to take pictures of something immediately, sometimes before they miss their opportunity to.
 
How much energy does RAM memory need? I suspect it's not a huge amount compared to all the rest, but keep in mind that RAM is always powered, even in standby mode when the screen and the CPU are effectively consuming zero power, so perhaps the power consumption of the RAM does play a role in the battery life.
Well... Linux does support memory hotplugging...
Yes, and even if it didn't, in the worst case I could live with a "reboot to 1GB RAM mode" option.

The question is: will the hardware support not powering part of the RAM? From what I understand, the 2GB is made out of 4 chips of 512MB, so theoretically I guess it should be possible to disable half of them, but would the hardware support that?

It would be nice to have some information about the (approximate) power consumption of the specific DDR3 RAM chips the Pyra is going to get, in particular while idle (doing nothing but refreshing itself). If the difference between 2GB and 1GB is only 2mW or so, then it doesn't matter much at all, but if it's 20mW or so, then it starts to be a factor I would take into account, because it would have a noticeable impact on the standby time (one or two days difference, perhaps).

Taking pictures: not so much, the camera app can take its time to load.
Maybe you feel that way. Other people want to be able to take pictures of something immediately, sometimes before they miss their opportunity to.
No no, what I meant to say is that on my phone, the camera app does sometimes take some time to load. I'm not saying this is a good thing ;)
 
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